No Arabic abstract
Many Gibbs measures with mean field interactions are known to be chaotic, in the sense that any collection of $k$ particles in the $n$-particle system are asymptotically independent, as $ntoinfty$ with $k$ fixed or perhaps $k=o(n)$. This paper quantifies this notion for a class of continuous Gibbs measures on Euclidean space with pairwise interactions, with main examples being systems governed by convex interactions and uniformly convex confinement potentials. The distance between the marginal law of $k$ particles and its limiting product measure is shown to be $O((k/n)^{c wedge 2})$, with $c$ proportional to the squared temperature. In the high temperature case, this improves upon prior results based on subadditivity of entropy, which yield $O(k/n)$ at best. The bound $O((k/n)^2)$ cannot be improved, as a Gaussian example demonstrates. The results are non-asymptotic, and distance is quantified via relative Fisher information, relative entropy, or the squared quadratic Wasserstein metric. The method relies on an a priori functional inequality for the limiting measure, used to derive an estimate for the $k$-particle distance in terms of the $(k+1)$-particle distance.
We formulate a continuous version of the well known discrete hardcore (or independent set) model on a locally finite graph, parameterized by the so-called activity parameter $lambda > 0$. In this version, the state or spin value $x_u$ of any node $u$ of the graph lies in the interval $[0,1]$, the hardcore constraint $x_u + x_v leq 1$ is satisfied for every edge $(u,v)$ of the graph, and the space of feasible configurations is given by a convex polytope. When the graph is a regular tree, we show that there is a unique Gibbs measure associated to each activity parameter $lambda>0$. Our result shows that, in contrast to the standard discrete hardcore model, the continuous hardcore model does not exhibit a phase transition on the infinite regular tree. We also consider a family of continuous models that interpolate between the discrete and continuous hardcore models on a regular tree when $lambda = 1$ and show that each member of the family has a unique Gibbs measure, even when the discrete model does not. In each case, the proof entails the analysis of an associated Hamiltonian dynamical system that describes a certain limit of the marginal distribution at a node. Furthermore, given any sequence of regular graphs with fixed degree and girth diverging to infinity, we apply our results to compute the asymptotic limit of suitably normalized volumes of the corresponding sequence of convex polytopes of feasible configurations. In particular, this yields an approximation for the partition function of the continuous hard core model on a regular graph with large girth in the case $lambda = 1$.
We extend the notion of Gibbsianness for mean-field systems to the set-up of general (possibly continuous) local state spaces. We investigate the Gibbs properties of systems arising from an initial mean-field Gibbs measure by application of given local transition kernels. This generalizes previous case-studies made for spins taking finitely many values to the first step in direction to a general theory, containing the following parts: (1) A formula for the limiting conditional probability distributions of the transformed system. It holds both in the Gibbs and non-Gibbs regime and invokes a minimization problem for a constrained rate-function. (2) A criterion for Gibbsianness of the transformed system for initial Lipschitz-Hamiltonians involving concentration properties of the transition kernels. (3) A continuity estimate for the single-site conditional distributions of the transformed system. While (2) and (3) have provable lattice-counterparts, the characterization of (1) is stronger in mean-field. As applications we show short-time Gibbsianness of rotator mean-field models on the (q-1)-dimensional sphere under diffusive time-evolution and the preservation of Gibbsianness under local coarse-graining of the initial local spin space.
We consider statistical mechanics models of continuous spins in a disordered environment. These models have a natural interpretation as effective interface models. It is well known that without disorder there are no interface Gibbs measures in infinite volume in dimension $d=2$, while there are ``gradient Gibbs measures describing an infinite-volume distribution for the increments of the field, as was shown by Funaki and Spohn. In the present paper we show that adding a disorder term prohibits the existence of such gradient Gibbs measures for general interaction potentials in $d=2$. This nonexistence result generalizes the simple case of Gaussian fields where it follows from an explicit computation. In $d=3$ where random gradient Gibbs measures are expected to exist, our method provides a lower bound of the order of the inverse of the distance on the decay of correlations of Gibbs expectations w.r.t. the distribution of the random environment.
This paper develops a non-asymptotic, local approach to quantitative propagation of chaos for a wide class of mean field diffusive dynamics. For a system of $n$ interacting particles, the relative entropy between the marginal law of $k$ particles and its limiting product measure is shown to be $O((k/n)^2)$ at each time, as long as the same is true at time zero. A simple Gaussian example shows that this rate is optimal. The main assumption is that the limiting measure obeys a certain functional inequality, which is shown to encompass many potentially irregular but not too singular finite-range interactions, as well as some infinite-range interactions. This unifies the previously disparate cases of Lipschitz versus bounded measurable interactions, improving the best prior bounds of $O(k/n)$ which were deduced from global estimates involving all $n$ particles. We also cover a class of models for which qualitative propagation of chaos and even well-posedness of the McKean-Vlasov equation were previously unknown. At the center of a new approach is a differential inequality, derived from a form of the BBGKY hierarchy, which bounds the $k$-particle entropy in terms of the $(k+1)$-particle entropy.
We show that nontrivial bi-infinite polymer Gibbs measures do not exist in typical environments in the inverse-gamma (or log-gamma) directed polymer model on the planar square lattice. The precise technical result is that, except for measures supported on straight-line paths, such Gibbs measures do not exist in almost every environment when the weights are independent and identically distributed inverse-gamma random variables. The proof proceeds by showing that when two endpoints of a point-to-point polymer distribution are taken to infinity in opposite directions but not parallel to lattice directions, the midpoint of the polymer path escapes. The proof is based on couplings, planar comparison arguments, and a recently discovered joint distribution of Busemann functions.